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Established in 1992, ICPADS has been a major international forum for scientists, engineers, and users to exchange and share their experiences, new ideas, and latest research results on all aspects of parallel and distributed computing systems. The 22nd IEEE International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS 2016) will be held in Wuhan, China, December 13-16, 2016. Contributions are solicited in all areas of parallel and distributed systems research and applications.

The Second International Conference "BOINC-based High Performance Computing: Fundamental Research and Development" is devoted to studying potential of distributed Desktop Grid computing, exchange of experience in creation and support of fundamental and applied BOINC projects. Among other, reports concerning technologies of development of distributed applications, processing of data, mathematical modeling of Desktop Grid, fundamental and applied BOINC projects will be presented. The conference will take place from 14 to 18 of September, 2015, in Petrozavodsk, Republic of Karelia. During the conference a meeting of the Russian Branch of "International Desktop Grid Federation" will be organized. Deadline for paper submission is April 20, 2015.

IDGF has released a new edition of the Crowd Computing for eScience Road Map on January 31, 2015. The document is comprised of two parts. The first part constitutes a bird view of all the relevant topics to be considered when setting up a Crowd Computing infrastructure. This management part is addressed to political stakeholders and the general public. The second part offers a detailed and step-by-step description in seven chapters of all the challenges and issues to be solved including relevant links to background information and practical examples. This technical part is aimed at Crowd Computing operators, scientific users, the academic user community, legal experts, and volunteer computing organisations. The Road map documents are available in the IDGF download section.

The organizers from the IDGF and AlmereGrid Foundations look back on a successful Crowd Computing 2014 event. The IDGF meeting welcomed 22 participants, including 3 remote presentations from IDGF members and the Workshop on Citizen Science Technology Platforms had 26 attendants, including 4 remote presenters.

The IDGF meeting concentrated on topics that are of direct interest to the member organisations of IDGF, especially those who operate Desktop Grids or Crowd Computing as we call it today. This year the focus was on 3 themes for Desktop Grid/Crowd computing operators and users: financial aspects, managing and operations, and communication, especially with citizens.

One of the new topics that emerged during the workshop on Citizen Science Technology Platforms was browser based Crowd Computing. Modern browsers have mostly implemented a very fast JavaScript engine. JavaScript programmes cannot only be used to calculate items to be displayed on the web page, but can do some rather heavy computational lifting these days. Several approaches and packages were discussed during the event. Philip Skinner talked about the http://Crowdca.lc browser based platform. Pedro Fonseca explained browser powered distributed computing, available at https://crowdprocess.com. There is also research going on in browser based computing platforms, as Reginald Cushing, University of Amsterdam, showed in his presentation about Distributed Computing on Browsers. The presenters also gave demos showing the technology is already a reality.

There were also several presentations with more information on financing Crowd computing. Charity Engine provided a working business model for commercial Crowd computing. Peter Hanappe summarized IDGF findings for volunteer based Crowd computing. He also looked at Green IT aspects, and introduced a measurement programme to collect data on the power usage and efficiency of applications running in Crowd computing.

The embedding of Crowd Computing in general frameworks that are used for instance in Smart City design and sensor clouds was discussed by Antonio Puliafito. There are more and more sensors, in the emerging Internet of Things, collecting more and more data. Frameworks are needed to collect, analyse and use this sensor data.

Probably the best example of an integrated use of all kinds of resources was given by David Wallom of Oxford university. Their Climate Prediction programme involves citizens, crowd computing platforms and federated Clouds. Because of the direct impact that Climate has on people's lives, it is easy to mobilise a lot of citizens, providing you do it on the right way.

The venue for the Crowd Computing 2014 Event has changed. The event will now take place at the headquarters of the IDGF Foundation - Manuscriptstraat 32 - 1321 NN Almere, The Netherlands.

The International Desktop Grid Federation is organising its first member meeting on September 24, 2014.

The first IDGF member meeting is co-located with two other events: a one-day tutorial on Crowd & Computing on September 23, and a workshop on Citizen Science Technology Platforms on September 25. The whole three-day event will take place under the umbrella of the Crowd Computing 2014 Event.

The IDGF technical meeting will concentrate on topics that are of direct interest to the members and member organisations of IDGF, especially those who operate Desktop Grids or Crowd Computing as we call it today.

The "Comet Trails" project at the Institute of Space Systems (IRS) at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, together with the Constellation Crowd computing Platform, to characterize dust trails produced by comets in the inner solar system. The simulation is run at computers of thousands of volunteers at home. You can find more information on the Aerospace Research net Web site.

In the Big Data Value Centre in Almere, in the Amsterdam Metropolitan region, the International Desktop Grid Federation is organising the Crowd Computing 2014 event, September 23-25, 2014. Crowd Computing 2014 brings together a community that is interested in several aspects of the field. The event kicks off with a one-day tutorial, followed by a technical meeting of the International Desktop Grid Federation. A workshop about Citizen Science Technology Platforms concludes the three-day event.

For the tutorial, the main focus will be on Crowd computing technologies and how they can be integrated into Citizen Science Platforms. Experts will give presentations on BOINC, the XtreemFS Cloud Files system, sensor Cloud computing, Big Data integration in Citizen Science platforms and other related topics. The Tutorial is organised by the Cloud Summerschool Almere.

On the second day, the 50 organisations and 250 individuals who are member of the International Desktop Grid Federation, will get the opportunity to meet other members and discuss common issues and opportunities. The technical meeting will focus on three themes for Desktop Grid/Crowd computing operators, including financial aspects; managing and operations; and communication, especially with citizens. At the end of the day the members will leave with a lot of exciting new ideas for their own infrastructure and donors.

The topic of the workshop on 25 September is "Citizen Science Technology Platforms". Interest in Citizen Science is growing rapidly. Crowd Sourcing and Crowd computing are giving it a boost. Most Citizen Science projects start out as a project developing their own support platform or using some general available packages. Recently more general Citizen Science Platforms are emerging that try to support more projects. In Crowd computing, some technology platforms are already in use for about a decade and have accumulated a wealth of experience. Although each citizen science project is different and can appeal to a different need there are a number of services and tools that can be used and shared among many projects. This could also help citizens move easily between projects. The workshop will focus on common tools and common services for Citizen Science Technology Platforms. Contributions for this workshop can be submitted until August 22, 2014.